Last time we talked about how e-book dominance is inevitable, and how the US is leading the charge. Pretty much everyone pegs the UK market as being around a year behind the US. However, latest figures show the gap may be closing.

In figures just released this morning, UK e-book sales – across all categories – have grown to over £16m ($26m), growing by over 300% on 2009 levels. By end of December 2010, they had captured 6% of the market.

They didn’t release a full breakdown of the figures, but did say that both fiction and non-fiction grew by around 300% and, bucking the trend we have seen in the US, children’s/YA grew faster – by over 500%.

These figures did not include what the PA calls “consumer reference” digital sales (presumably dictionaries and encyclopaedias etc.) which showed strong sales of £14m ($23m).

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About David Gaughran

David is Irish and lives in Dublin, where it rains every day and conversation is a sport. He writes historical adventures and has helped thousands of authors to self-publish through his workshops, books, and this here blog.

Thanks Hektor, it’s pretty much ready to go, I’m just waiting on a typo in the description line (a repeated line) to update, probably take a few hours more.

It’s frustrating. I had special characters in my description that I typed when I uploaded the book. When my listing first appeared on Amazon, those characters appeared as question marks instead and it looked terrible. I replaced them, but the changes took 24 hours to appear. When they finally did, I noticed when I cut and pasted I replicated a line of text, so now it appears twice! I corrected it straight away, but it will took another 24 hours to change (but should be done soon).

It’s frustrating because I don’t want to start emailing everyone and promoting it until it is fixed. I would think twice about buying a book, especially a self-published book, if it had a typo in the description.

A stupid mistake by me has cost me a day!

Funny thing is though, it didn’t stop 4 people buying it already, even when it had no cover image up. One even left a very nice review.

I think their systems will get better because they will have to, because of the growing deluge.

Amazon are losing market share but self-publishers consider them by far the easiest site to use with the most functionality, as well as bringing them the most sales. All of its competitors are even more frustrating to use or don’t have the same level of sales.

I don’t think it would be a big thing to be able to update the description in real-time or even slightly delayed. Technologically, I can’t why it would require a huge push.

And it is very, very frustrating. I submitted the changes to my description well over 24 hours ago, and they are yet to appear. It means that I will have to delay the launch of my book by one day, minimum. Which is really annoying!